Kids animal jigsaw, a brain puzzle for Android

Overview

One of the (many) challenges parents have today when raising kids is technology. Not in a way that parents don’t understand it, but in how to limit the amount of time your kids spend playing with or looking at technology devices. Since we have smartphones and tablets it’s not very difficult for kids to always have a device around to play with. I solved this challenge partially by only installing educational apps and games on the devices, forcing my kid when he gets his hands on the devices to play something that as a result helps him learn. That’s why I have alphabet/digit learning apps, coloring books, interactive stories, brain puzzles and many others installed. It’s also a strategy that I recommend to other parents, just leave wifi turned off by default (luckily my kid doesn’t yet understand this) and kids will be “forced” into playing the educational apps instead of watching something that has no educational value. “Kids animal jigsaw puzzles” is one of those fun but educational apps, as it will allow kids to solve puzzles of various difficulty.

About the game

This game has until now 11 different puzzles all with various cute baby animals. Kittens, doggies, lion cubs – cuteness overload in a puzzle form. This puzzle is very simple to start and play with, as there are no options to set. Basically when it’s started all that your kids have to do is choose which of the puzzles to play with and the difficulty of the puzzle.

For each of the puzzles there are six different difficulty levels depending on how many corresponding puzzle pieces there are: 6, 15, 24, 35, 48, 63. Now if you have some math skills you’re probably wondering why this sequence of possible puzzle pieces, as I have. Turns out that if you ignore the first digit, 6, all the rest of them are actually the solution of (n*n – 1) where n ranges from 4 to 8 – if the first number was 8 there would’ve been a perfect series.

Anyway, obviously the most easy puzzle is the one that has only 6 pieces and the most difficult one is that with 63 pieces. Depending on the age of the child and their brain puzzle solving skills, they will be able to complete the puzzle and compose back the cute little animal. The way it’s created, whenever two puzzle pieces that match are close together they will be automatically grouped. This is a helpful feature for kids as they don’t need to have perfect matches.

Here are some of the features “Kids animal jigsaw puzzles” has to offer:

Free puzzles. In total there are currently 11 images that are transformed in puzzles of various difficulty. There are no locked puzzles or ones that require in-app purchases, all of these are free to play with. Starting one is very simple, after swiping through the images and deciding on one, all that’s need for it to start is tapping on the image and after that selecting the difficulty. The pieces will be spread and they can be dragged and matched with others.

A puzzle of medium difficulty

Cute graphics. All the graphics used for the puzzles are of cute little animals. Kittens, dogs, lions, bunnies, safari and many others can be split into pieces and re-grouped based on their match. Other puzzle images will be added in the future for sure, all of cute little animals as kids (and adults alike) enjoy them a lot.

Cute little animal images for puzzles

Easy to play. This brain puzzle is designed for kids age 3 and up and thus it’s very simple to play it. There are no menus or text to read, there’s no start button or anything related. Basically when you start the game all you have to do is choose a puzzle and start moving the pieces around. With my 3.5 year old son, whenever he’s playing something he’ll get to a point where he has to ask me to start that or skip that (i.e. advertisement), but with a game as simple as this there’s no need to do so. It’s very intuitive for kids.

The easiest level in the animal jigsaw puzzle

Varying difficulty. For each of the images (11 so far) there are 6 different difficulty levels, thus a total of 66 different puzzles. While the 6 piece one is trivial and intended for younger kids (even less than 3 years), the 63 piece one is much more difficult, to the point where it takes some time for an adult to finish it too. But that’s the beauty of brain puzzles, the more difficult the better.

The most difficult level for a puzzle, lots of small pieces

Free. All the puzzles included are free, there are no additional ones to purchase for a given price or any other types of in-app purchases. It does display a small ad banner at the bottom of the screen, but at least on tablets you barely interact with that zone anyway. One suggestion would be to include, for a fee, the option to remove the ads to be truly kid-safe.

Conclusion

Kids love small cute animals and that’s why they’ll like a brain puzzle such as this one. I don’t let my kid use the tablet for purposes other than playing educational apps and games and as a parent you should do the same too. I don’t see a point for kids to watch even cartoons on a tablet, when they could be easily learning new things while having fun.